Monthly Archives: June 2016

POP QUIZ: Why is the Amazon Called the Amazon? In ancient Greece, there was a legend about feared women warriors called the Amazons. They threw spears and looked rather large and fearsome, so when the first explorers came and saw the natives with spears and long hair, they thought they were the Amazons, thus giving the jungle its famous name.

It all started at 11:00pm on the 20th of May. The bus ride to the jungle was even worse than in Laos. There at least, we had had some sort of bed to sleep on, here though we only had narrow seats to try to make the 8 hours go by faster. We had a 3 hour wait in the capital of the region, Lago Agrio. On top of that, we had an additional 2 hours of bus ahead of us. At the entrance of the preserve, we were greeted by our guides who led our group to the pirogues, narrow canoes with motors. We were very unlucky, for fat drops of rain started to pour down on top of us.

Riding on the Amazon River reminded me a lot of Tortuguero in Costa Rica. The dense forest, the logs hidden just beneath the murky brown water, the vines hanging down from dead trees… As the first hour dragged along, and the forest got deeper darker and the river wider, so did my imagination. At every movement of a leaf I imagined there to be an angry jaguar ready to pounce, a silent boa eying me closely, or a hungry caiman eager to get its mid-day meal of a skinny 13 year-old girl. After 2 wet hours, our lodge came into view. Had we not stopped at the dock, I would have missed it.

For lunch we had chicken with mashed potatoes. Our room had a thatched roof with nothing closing it off so spiders and such had made their homes along the beams. That night we did a sunset cruise that led into a night walk. Only 4 out of the 12 of us there had flashlights, so I spent most of the time looking at the ground to try to avoid the roots and mud puddles. The sounds of the animals were deafening, aside from a couple tarantulas, scorpions, a night monkey and a lobster cricket. I was really expecting to see more wildlife because, well, this is, The Amazon. On our way out, a boat from our lodge picked us up. He maneuvered the long boat seamlessly through the mangrove patches in pitch black darkness.

We went on another tour during the day and it started to pour down so hard, my poncho was soaked on the inside! We saw a few monkeys playing in the trees and blue and red macaws flying overhead. Of course there were also many insects such as bees and termites and leaf cutter ants. The most interesting animal was spotted by our guide, as usual. It was a tiny poison dart frog with the colors of Ecuador; blue, red, and yellow. It was buried under a bush, so it took the rest of the group a minute to spot it. Our guides were incredible at finding animals, like a foot-long boa constrictor wrapped around a branch at night, or an immobile sloth sleeping high in the crook of a tree, or even small brown bird seamlessly camouflaged on top of a branch! Near the end of that excursion, we came upon a muddy swamp. We all had rain boots, but there was a gap in between the sizes 39-43, so most of us had big boots. Anyway, the mud was at least 1ft deep in most places, so our boots got stuck. Jayden actually fell into it, so from the knees down he was completely covered in mud. That evening we took another cruise down the river and I swam, so now I can say that I went swimming in the Amazon!

After the sun set over the jungle, we went looking for caimans. Their eyes reflect light when it hits them, so at night it’s easier to spot them with flashlights when it’s dark outside. After an hour, we saw all but two, and they were half hidden under the water, so we didn’t have much luck with that. For dinner (I don’t remember what I had for dinner, but I do remember what I did) I talked with the people from my end of the table; Britt, Daphne, Holly… They talked about their professions and asked me what I wanted to be, and I told them entrepreneur. We talked and played Jenga until the lights went out at around 10:00. I hated the smell of bat guano in our room from the small fisher bats flying up above in the ceiling, so I spent as little time in there as possible.

On our last full day in the jungle we visited one of the communities. There were 150 people living in that particular community, and it was almost modern. It had a stadium of sorts, a high school, and elementary school, and about half the houses were made with cinder block. Little boys were playing together in the river with canoes. Our guide took us all around the community to make us try the different fruits like cacao fruit, a weird marshmallow-looking gummy fruit whose name has escaped me just about like all the other bizarre foods I’ve eaten. Then we made bread with a lady called Maria. She was of native descent, her eyes were creased, and her skin was slightly darker than that if the Inca Indians. The bread had only one ingredient, and that was yucca, a long white root that has almost has a potato-like texture, and picking it from the forest was the first step in making the bread. After we pealed and washed the yucca, Maria put our group to work on grating it. Grated, they looked more like cottage cheese than potatoes. Yucca is made up of 85% water, which is highly toxic. In the olden days, people who were unwelcome to a village would be given a special drink of fruits with that water mixed into it. That would be both a welcome drink and a farewell drink! Maria wrung the mixture out in a small woven, palm hammock. She repeated that process for five minutes, and the water never stopped flowing out! The big bucket she had placed underneath was 1/3 full by the time she finished. With a coconut bowl, she then scooped up the dry yucca flour and spread it on a thin clay plate that had been heating over a fire. A few minutes later, the yucca crepe/bread was ready. The crunchy small granules left a dry feeling in my mouth, Nutella would have helped with that, but no supermarkets, not even Mega Maxi have it in stock.

After lunch we went to the shaman. Although he was only 55 years old, he was already a great-great grandfather. The people in this community get married very young, in fact, I would already be married by now, which is really scary. The shaman was dressed in traditional dress, with big seed necklaces, a long green tunic, and a beautiful headdress made with the feathers of tropical birds which he had make himself. He talked about ayahuasca, a special juice made with a special type of root and tulip. For graduation, the apprentice shamans must drink this juice. It works almost like a drug. You have hallucinations and bizarre dreams, and to become a real shaman, you have to be able to control those dreams and images.

It was a shame that we had to leave early that next morning at 9:30. The bus ride was as terrible as the first ride (which didn’t surprise me). All in all, the Amazon was a must-see place in Ecuador. Though I would have liked to see more animals in the jungle and less in our room (the bats and their horrible poop were the worst)! I’m going to miss all the people from my group. I liked socializing with other people again and being part of a group. I got to meet some really amazing people whom I considered like my siblings, even if it was just for 4 days. At first I thought I would be relieved to be back in Quito, with creature comforts like a modern apartment with electricity all day and hot water, but some part of me the was disappointed to leave Amazonia, that I had not seen what all there is to see, or experienced all that can be experienced, but I knew I had. I have seen more and felt more of the Amazon than all of my friends and classmates will probably ever experience in their entire lives, so I won’t complain about that.

The 7 hour bus ride came to a halt in a small town called Lago Agrio. We got onto a long narrow canoe called a Pirogue. I was starting to think that we were never going to make it to the lodge because we had a very long bus ride and then the canoe ride was never ending.

I was expecting to see a lot more animals but I guess we see what we can in the forest. The guides were incredible at spotting things. Ours spotted a small white Amazon tree boa, in the dark, and the boat was moving superfast. He saw a camouflaged poison dart frog and they are so tiny about 1inch big.

On one trek we went on, it was incredibly rainy . We walked in the rain for hours and it became super muddy. There was an area called palm swamps and the mud nearly overflowed in my boots. I took a serious mud bath first my boot came completely off and my foot got drenched in mud I would have had to walk without a boot if a really nice Swiss person hadn’t pulled my boot out. After that I completely fell hands first in the deep mud, I was truly covered. But in the end I took a really nice swim in the Amazon River. Another day we saw the pink erawati river dolphins. They were more grey than pink and you only saw their fins and a part of their head. I was hoping to see an anaconda but those are a lot more active in the dry season. A bird that we saw a lot was the stinky turkey, they looked like fat phoenixes. When we were on a tour we spotted a snake bird, it was like a heron. It was just posing in so many ways, it was like it meant to put on a show.

Surprisingly I slept really well every night considering that the beds were basic. One day my mom woke up at 6:00 A.M to go bird watching and she said that she saw a lot of yellow macaws and toucans. Our guide said that we were lucky in see the animals that we saw because a lot of times there aren’t that much. We saw 3 sloths and both of the kinds, the 2 toed sloth and the 3 toed sloth. We saw 6 of 7 species of monkeys. We saw the red howler monkeys, squirrel monkeys, little night monkey in their house, monk sacky monkey, white capuchins, and the woolly monkey. One night we went on the jungle walk where we saw scorpions, 3 giant tarantulas, a lobster cricket that was as big as my hand, and a night monkey that was active. After we went looking for caimans, we saw 2. One was a spectacle caiman that disappeared before we could take a picture, but the other was a black caiman and we just go a picture of him.

We visited an Amazonian community. We learned how to make a kind of bread from manioc. It was like pita bread but the texture was like a bunch of bread crumbs made into a bread. After lunch we visited the Shaman. He was decorated with a headdress made from the feathers of exotic birds, necklaces made of animal teeth, nuts, and seeds. The law was that the shaman had to make everything himself. He said that to become a shaman you had to train for 15 years, those that trained for less were more like sorcerers than shamans. They were given a special drink called ayawasca. That put you in a kind of spiritual world. I learned how to fire a blow gun, and in 3 tries I hit the target. Melia’s dart landed 1 meter in front of it. Our guide showed us what a cocoa bean looks like before they get dried, they were encased in a white fruit that tasted exactly like mango. It was nice to meet a lot of interesting people and see everything that we saw. After getting back to Quito for one more day we left for Lima Peru.

We had good luck this time, our flight left on schedule and we had no problems landing at the Baltra Aeropuerto. I had no idea that landscape could change so much within such a short amount of time. It went from Arizona desert, to semi-tropical, to jungle, to semi-arid. We saw a few iguanas on the way to Porto Ayora. The sound of Urban music and the smell of fresh empanadas followed us all the way to our hotel. We stayed long enough to drop off our bags and then mom and dad made Jayden and I get up and walk to the port. But I’m so glad they did, because that might have been my favorite moment on this trip. Traveling around the world for a year can make a girl spoiled. Now there are only a handful of things and places that’ll really impress me, this was one of them. As I looked down from the boardwalk and into the emerald green water, I saw black-tipped reef sharks, in the harbor! Incredible! And then to my left there were 3 sea lions, hanging out on the beach. There were pelicans flapping around the rocks trying to get the orange crabs and sea turtles gliding gracefully through the water. Remember, all this was still happening in the same harbor.

The Galapagos is renowned for its snorkeling. So on our first day there, that is what we did. A “water taxi” took us to an island whose dock was being guarded by a sea lion. As if this was the usual nuisance, our driver got off the boat and started chasing it around the dock until the sea lion flopped into the ocean. It was so hot out and the water looked so clear, all I wanted to do was swim with it, but of course, I could not do that, yet. Up the wooden stairs that lead over a small ravine and through the maze of paddle cacti and thorny paloverde, to the ocean. There wasn’t much of a beach, mostly lava rocks and…marine iguanas. A lot of them. Their black scales blended perfectly with the rocks. I accidently stepped on ones tail and surprised a few others.

Back across the island, the sea lion had once again managed to get to the dock, and again our driver had to get it out of the way of the boat to make room for the boat. Snorkel time! I was reluctant at first to get into the 68 degrees water, but the push of people trying to get out of the boat forced me to go in. The cold water pressed around me, filling my mask, pushing the air out of my lungs. No sooner had I reached the surface, I was breathless again; a sea turtle had just brushed against my foot! I followed it with the rest of my family. Though the murky turquoise water veiled it from our eyes, and from the Go Pro. Coincidently, there was another one right around the corner. Afterwards we saw little else, and the cold water seemed to get the best of me. Last stop was Las Grietas, a salt water gorge in the middle of the island. The water looked beautiful, but I didn’t swim. The following day we took a ferry to another island, San Cristobal.

I stayed in our hotel for a few hours, waiting for my queasiness to pass. For dinner we ate at a pizza place which was, in the end, mediocre at best. My favorite part was going to see the sea lion beach next door. Hundreds of them were sprawled out on the sand. Oh, but the smell! Sea lions may quite be the smelliest creatures I have ever encountered! Their scent is a mix of poop, pee, fish, and sea water, only multiplied by a thousand in this place. They were rude too. They were clambering all over each other, no wonder they sound so grumpy. What broke my heart was watching the pups crying out for their mothers, and being rejected by all the others.

For my dad’s birthday, we took a big snorkeling trip around the island. For the first hour, I felt sea sick so I fell asleep on the bench and unfortunately missed the big fish my brother caught while fishing. After the first stop, in turtle bay, I felt alleviated of my sea sickness. The beach there was almost a white as White Haven Beach in Australia! The water was also as clear and as blue as I remember it being in the Whit Sundays Islands. But here, a sea lion swam amongst us. At first it was mostly interested in the fish in the back of the boat, but then it became more playful and started to swim all around us. It came so close to me that I reached out and touched it! That was clearly a new sensation for that sea lion because it turned its face toward me and made to bite. But instead, he/she nuzzled my hand and swam away in between my legs! Sea lions are more like dogs than lions. They lay around on rocks or on the beach most of the day, and are very playful with each other or even people. Then we went to Kicker Rock. Although the day was a sweltering 90 degrees, the water there was 50 degrees F, and without a wet suit, it was like ice water. The moment I touched that water, my muscles started to contract and cramp, making an otherwise beautiful snorkel less enjoyable. The large crevice in between the two rocks was home to many aquatic animals such as sea turtles, parrot fish, puffer fish, sharks, and of course, sea lions. The water was so deep and blue, that I couldn’t see the bottom. Although the swim was beautiful, my mind was set on climbing back up into the boat and wrapping myself in a warm towel.